quote of the day

With a little time, and a little help, and a little thinking, I managed to be able to get a "Quote of the Day" section on this blog, that will not require much effort to update.

Thanks to Glenn, a fellow TypePadder, for giving me the kernel of the how-to. Glenn posted a tip on the TypePad User Group about doing the "Quote of the Day" concept. What he does is pretty elegant, but for a newbie like myself the words (if they are even words): blogger API, XML-RPC, perl, and cron may as well have been Sanskrit, and I told him so in my reply to his initial post.

However, as I am somewhat of a quote junkie, I really wanted this. So, I mulled over it, occasionally re-reading Glenn's post, and trying to puzzle it out conceptually. Still not much luck.

The aha! moment...

...came tonight when I decided I'd try to circumvent some of the excess coding, giving up some of the functionality (like automatic updating of the list using a txt file and cron) and simply seeing if I could update the quote by making a separate blog entry each day. This will not be a big burden to me, as I have several notebooks and published books of quotes to choose from. This way, instead of doing a random quote, I can pick one based on my mood at the time.

Anyhow, I managed to lose the functionality Glenn built in, but I also lost all of those odd words that I only understood a little bit.

The result is what you see at the top of the page, just under the banner. To change it, I have to either: make a new post (in a separate blog), or change the current one on a daily basis. New posts will allow an archive of old quotes, but will also take up disk space.

What it required (in TypePad):
- a Pro account (with the abilitiy to create multiple blogs)
- a few new lines in my current CSS.
- a few new lines in my current index.html
- a new index template built (with exactly one line in it).
- a new blog called "quotes".

Please excuse me if I seem terribly full of myself, but this is a bit of a breakthrough for me.

Good Night.